Banxi's Tips Ahoy!
Assorted tips for advanced players Just my 2 cents on assorted topics STAGES The Slow Tank Unlike all other classes your main tank should not have attack speed on stages. You want him as slow as possible so that he doesn't go to the enemy, but rather the enemy amasses on him, creating an nice AoE and penetration shots pocket. By the way, aoe and penetration shots are mostly magical damage, and the mellee classes amassing on your tank tend to be vulnerable to it. The downside might be that you have to deactivate his offensive abilities so that his stun and protection skills are cast fast enough and don't stay forever on the ready to cast area due to the high global cooldown. Archers ready The single best stage pusher is an Archer. Period. The sooner you accept this, the better. He’s also the fastest backline killer ingame. He does, however, have less survivability then a Knight. While on pvp you want to protect your damage penetration classes (archer, buffer, knight) usually by ensuring they are not in your oponents line of fire (using tank on front top and buffer or archer on back bottom), on stages the exact opposite happens: * Put your main meatshield front top; * Put your archer back top; * Check what happens each time he fires skill 1. By lining up like this you just made your skill 1 way more effective. Because enemy melee amassing on your tank are all hit by the penetration shot and, as you see it going away, it hits the enemy mid and backliners due to its point of origin. The same goes for a buffer. Mind control – building momentum Buffer Mind control is the single best ability to have on stage pushes. You can be sure mind control is at a good level when you start to loose a series of consecutive fights after a wipe – that means that the team lost its buff momentum and needs either luck or a long fight to get the buffs back on. Perma buff Mind control, necro debuff, archer speed, etc… sweetspot is once they become permanent. Buffs don’t go away in between stages so you need max colldown and have enouth buff levels ensure they are always up. Transitional runes Cooltime/crit damage/hit rate rune is very important for stage pushes. They are not final runes so shouldn’t be pushed past 30. But 1 or 2 of them brigde the gap between a starting and a final runeset. Your goal is to ease out of them as you build up all 9 characters gear. But that takes huge amounts of time and investment. And these runes ensure you have solid skill cooldown and that it hits the opponent. Secondary stats - Toughness is very important but on stages hit rate is even more important – missing a stun or a high cooldown damage skill... sucks. - Maximum cooldown with some attack speed is a must – having max cooldown on a crowd control team is great, but utterly inefficient if you haven’t built up attack speed and your skills get accumulated on the ready to cast area. As it stands attack speed not only increases your auto-attack but, most importantly, it reduces the global cooldown on your casts until they eventually become instant. My advice… use rings for it on mid and backliners. - Be dependent on high hit rate crowd control and steady damage. Be independent of critical hits (at least until very late game). Multiple sources of crowd control add randomness to fights. And that’s usually a good thing when your headbutting your top stage over and over again. Eventually you land that 0.01% chance combo that makes you pass that stage. Game speed matters Very often you can pass a stage you otherwise couldn’t by changing back to 1x game speed in the middle of the previous level (*49 or *99). This is because there seems to be some sort of bug on some skills damage output at 3x speed. At 1x gamespeed you can also take control of a stunner (tank or buffer), deactivate it’s crowd control skill from autocast and use it manually to time it right: * i.e.: if you use your tank stun right at the beginning of a dragon fight not only do you buy time for your buffer to stun, but you can actually prevent the dragon from spitting its AoE near your team, taking the fight to it’s side (if he was originally targeting one of your mellee heroes) Revive book > Ancient Scroll On stages revive book is more important than ancient scroll. Simply put you want dead characters to come back to life with maximum hp possible so you don’t loose the buff momentum on back and mid lane. While you transition stages cooldown timers keep going, so your buffer and healer heals/shields should cover for whatever is missing on your alive characters. But they rarely are enough to bring dead characters to full HP. Oh and as far as ancient artifacts go… they do work and they are a must. Assorted cookies - Do weekly pushes with silver lvl 1500 heroes. Ideally during weekly pvp end day so you are buffed for that reward as well. And take advantage of those pushes, using the extra gems it generates for big investments such as pushing a weapon or a rune to 50. - Convince your guildmates to focus on shared research #2. Its very effective at dragon fights and frontline endurance. - Why rush stages? For 1, the free gold gets a huge boost. For 2, the gem influx gets better and better the more you push. Those dragon kills land you 100 more gems per kill. Might not seem much at first but at stage 35k the dragon lands you 7,4k gems… and that number keeps increasing. For 3, when you get distracted and forget to rebirth at the right level (it's bound to happen, you know it) at least you get alot more rebirth points from it. PVP Rank Matters! You can be put in vs anyone within a 30 point range from you (up or down) but that’s not the only factor on the matchmaker. See that little medal on the current standings? You have a much higher chance to be paired VS other players with the same medal. How to measure performance on pvp With the exception of the #1 player on the server, all others can know if they are performing right if they have a high win ratio on the attack log and a very low win % on the defense log. It indicates you know when to stop hitting but aren’t underplaying you PVP position. UP TO 50 PRIORITIES 1st – Get a weapon to 50. 2nd – If your first weapon wasn’t a bow, get a bow to 50. 3rd – Get 3 runes to 50. 4th – Get you third weapon to 50. 5th – Do the next 3 runes to 50. (If you prefer, you can spread develop secondary stat runes because the growth is flat, not scaled. It's a matter of personal choice. Just make sure those are actually your final runes if you're spread developing) While doing this, focus on converting materials to increase a single piece of armor to 50 on two characters. For cloth/leather do either a cooldown or a critical rate piece. For chain/plate do a toughness piece or a critical rate piece (do critical rate only if your teams main dps is a warrior/knight). Do not spread develop armor. Focus on each piece up to 50 because, unlinke secondary stat runes, armor behaves like weapons: the closer you are to 50 the higher the scaling. DUNGEONS - Swamp is the only place where playing at 3x speed makes you win levels you otherwise would loose at 1x speed. - Your most solid damage dealer on a dungeon is a mage – especially on dungeon 3. Nothing beats the sheer burst speed of mage skill 2 on single target ingame pve (and at killing world dungeon tanks) - PVP focused teams tend to have more success on dungeon 2 because it’s the dungeon where a pvp runeset works better. - The hit rate and critical rate requirements of dungeons are considerably smaller compared to stages. The same goes for world bosses. Take that into account when choosing what runes to use on dungeons. - Swap gears, swap hero places, swap gems. Play around because placement matters and can land you 70 to 100 more levels. Try a backline knight if that’s your main dps source. Do crazy stuff. The simple fact that a buffer is on center backrow position (dies faster) or top/bottom backrow position (usually lasts 1 more attack) can give you 20 more levels of progress on dungeon 1 because he lands a stun in-between that extra attack. Dungeon 1 – Use sheer speed and dps runeset. Glass cannon is the best way to push it. Archer is decent. Mage is ideal. Frontline Knight doesn’t survive long enouth to be meaningfull due to poison. Dungeon 2 – Use PvP build. Knight is decent. Mage and archer are very close and ideal. Dungeon 3 – Use your PvP runeset with 1 rune swaped out for extra cooldown, attack speed and crit damage. Mage is godlike DPS here, able to push you way past lvl 400 alone. Haven’t tested warrior so can’t comment on that. - tier 1 materials cap at 50% drop rate on Dungeon level 333 DUPLICATE CLASSES When you have duplicate classes on your team make sure they aren’t overriding. If you have 2 healers or 2 buffers, there is absolutely no point in having the same gear on both. The skills will be synced in battle and that’s a waste. So use gear level or dust to make sure they desync buffs, stuns, debuffs, etc. Dual buffer stun desynced is one of the most powerfull weapons ingame… #Stunlock #FoundMyKnightCryingOnTheOtherRoom THE DAILLY ROUTINE If you are going to stay away from the game leaving it running for a long period of time (i.e.: sleep): - Take your boots off; - Rebirth with a needle and piggy bank on; - Enjoy the gold gain next morning; - Do 24 hours auto-extract if your main farm time is above stage 5K; - Do 2 or 3 Major Gems cubes; - Put a single level on each miner; - Pump your heroes up with the overnight silver income... and only then do infinity dungeon. Avoid using more then 2 minor pots on it (i ocasionally use power & blow). It's still a gem for gold trade, so it's a bad deal. HERO DISTRIBUTION PVP distributions to minimise penetration damage X = Empty Slot H = Hero Slot H''' = Hero Protected from Penetration Shots 2 slots X X H '''H X X X X X 3 slots (credit to Argonne on midlane option) X X H H''' X X X '''H X 4 slots (1 frontline) X X H H''' X X '''H H''' X 4 slots (2 frontline damage share) X X H '''H H''' X X X H 4 slots (Tank (T) / Knight or Warrior (M)) X M T X X X '''H H''' X (haven't tested this in a while but armor/class type = a taunt. With the exception of frontrow placement, if you have a plate/chain class on midrow and a cloth/leather class on the same row, the enemy will prioritize the chain/plate armor. If this hasn't changed, use it to your advantage to avoid penetration shots) 5 slots X X H '''H H''' X '''H H''' X 6 slots H X H '''H H''' X '''H H''' X 7 slots H H H '''H H X H H X 8 slots H H H H H X H H H ps.: From 5 slots onwards there are way to many scenarios to consider. #HaveFun #WayToLazyToFormatThisIntoPretty